Vendredi, 24 juillet 2009

In linux/Xorg, use inet(dtk2000) in xorg.conf's XkbLayout option (in
addition to whatever basic layout you are already using) to be able to use the
navigation and multimedia keys in the Typematrix EZReach 2030 USB keyboard.
Only the eject key is not working. After that, it's up to the applications
or window manager to make use of them, this config option only associates X11
symbols to the keys. I hadn't found this information anywhere on the web, I
hope it will be useful to someone.

Mardi, 7 juillet 2009

Firefox didn't allow me to print by default. Printing to a file was the only
proposed option. The culprit here is not even Firefox but GTK, which needs to
be told that there is life beyond printing to a file. I put to my
$HOME/.gtkrc-2.0 file the following line: gtk-print-backends="pdf,cups,lpr,file",
and I could finally print to lpr.

Debian Lenny's default kernel is tickless, meaning that there is no periodic
tick anymore. As a result, it seems that some applications that use
periodically short sleeps (as in while(1) { // do possibly something; usleep(250); })
are scheduled far too often and the CPU is running more than in should while
the system is seemingly idle. Passing the option nohz=off to the kernel
seems to have fixed that problem.

I didn't need to say bye bye to
Helvetica
after all. The least bad compromise seems to be using the bitmap Helvetica
font for GUI anyway, and set Firefox to use DejaVu fonts without allowing web
sites to decide what font to use (I don't have anything besides DejaVu anyway,
so I won't miss anything by doing so).

I have used Helvetica as the sole font in WindowMaker for the past 12 years
(AFAICR). I recently upgraded to Debian Lenny and switched from Mozilla 1.7 to
Firefox 3.5 (at last!) I managed to setup my system to use the Helvetica
bitmap font, which looks much nicer than Nimbus Sans (the Type 1 equivalent)
in WindoMaker, and I was happy. But I discovered that Firefox now (AFAICT)
prints Helvetica text using the Helvetica bitmap font, which produces very
ugly documents. Mozilla was somehow smart enough to use vector fonts for that,
but not Firefox. Helvetica seems to be something of the past :(

So I switched to DejaVu fonts for WindowMaker and Nimbus for GTK applications
and Firefox. It's so sad.